In the fifth year of the war two men sat alone in a railway carriage. One pale, young, and rather worn, had an unlighted cigarette in his mouth. The other elderly, prosperous, and of a ruddy countenance, was smoking a large cigar. The young man, who looked as if his days were strenuous, took his unlighted cigarette from his mouth, gazed at it, searched his pockets, and looked at the elderly man, and said, ... "Could you give me a light, sir?" The elderly man regarded him for a moment, dropped his eyelids, and murmured: "I've no matches." The young man sighed, mumbled the cigarette on his watering lips, then said very suddenly: "Perhaps you'll very kindly give me a light from your cigar, sir." The elderly man moved throughout his body as if something very sacred had been thrilled within him. "I'd rather not," he said, "if you don't mind." A quarter of an hour passed, while the young man's cigarette grew moister, and the elder man's cigar shorter. Then the latter stirred, took it from under his grey moustache, looked critically at it, held it out a little way towards the other with the side which was least burned-down foremost, and said: "Unless you'd like to take it from the edge."
And there are people who are surprised that the returned soldier occasionally commits acts of violence.
THOUGHTS IN MIDDLE LIFE. By G. Locker Lampson. Humphreys. 3s. 6d. net.
This book is beautifully printed on admirable paper, and is priced very low. Unfortunately Mr. Locker Lampson has reached middle life without learning that most platitudes are better unwritten. "No man is a hero to his own valet, and the same principle may be applied as in part the cause of our invidious comparisons between the men of yesterday and those of to-day." "He alone has a right to be called successful who has led a happy life." Sometimes he will enliven his platitude by a pleasing derangement of metaphors. "Autobiographies are of little value in extending the personality of their authors. We may get an occasional glimpse below the surface, but the waters are generally agitated by all kinds of subsidiary motives, and the eye cannot pierce them." The one sentence which explains the author is to be found in the essay One's Own Company: "No man, then, need ever be bored by himself, although he cannot avoid being bored by others."
DOMUS DOLORIS. By W. Compton Leith. The Bodley Head. 7s. 6d. net.
In the unornamental language, from which even the loftiest intelligence may extract apt expression for itself, this little book may be called a collection of thoughts in hospital from a patient's standpoint, and an impression of the various nurses who attended him. And yet such a description is unjust and utterly beside the point. The publisher's note upon the cover tells us that Mr. Leith has "a rare sense of the value of words and the beauty of phrases," and there is no doubt of it. But the value to literature and humanity of phrases which are but the vehicles of their own intrinsic beauty is to be questioned. The whole essay is precious in the last degree.
"Oblivion flowed up like evening gloom. Life moved with it to the edge of a great deep; it was drawn over; it floated down and down, wound in the arms of sleep."
"A faint awareness stole into being, like the grey of morning; then a sense of movement; but whether it was a coming up and forth, or a declining, there was no power to tell."
This sort of thing, exquisite as it may be sometimes, constantly reminds us, however, and with relief, that Henley, with simplicity and humour, covered the same ground in verse. From time to time an unpretentious passage comes to us with a shock, and we ask ourselves again and again, if, as it seems, the writer has opinions to air, observations about life and death to make, what especial virtue there is in the high-falutin obscurity of his expression. One of the chief and most necessary concealments of art lies in a well-simulated nonchalance to the more obvious kind of purple patch. Here the entire robe is of purple, though certainty of a royal shade. There were voices, Mr. Leith tells us on the first page (and it was not until the fifteenth that we knew where the voices came from), which "kept thought strained after a meaning." A light strain is no doubt good for thought; but in reading this book it is not light: and it is hard to say which strain is the more severe—the student's for meaning or the author's for effect.